The attacks on the Aust Camp site are just tests to see the level of ease to "hijack and take this site down" and believe me it takes awhile to recover. You cannot get control back to fix the prob.....Plus they (the hackers) offer help to regain control for a monetary price.

The posts need to be deleted (you guys have the power) but you also need to set up some parameters to a) screen who joinsb) screen/stop posts either unsavory URLs or text content etc.

a) have seen this done on other forums, and its a royal PITA. Not only does it involve count less hours of extra work for the already underpaid admin, but it means legitimate new users may have to wait for possibly days before they are 'accepted'.b) the weblinks they post are ever changing,not just from similar domains however word sensors are already in place which should stuff around with most of their links, but If someone's dumb enough to click on one anyway and they get a virus, tuff.

As you can see, its not popular web mail services that they use any more, its a constantly changing domain so there's no point continually updating ban lists as next week it will just be a different one.

This is not a one off occurance, its and on-going problem which is delt with as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Tonight was the worst I've ever seen it on this forum usually the messages and users responsible are deleted before anyone else sees it, and often, new users are booted long before they post because of the obviously dodgy information in their profile.

This has been a public service announcement, this is not a test, thank you for your co-operation, we now return you to your usual broadcast

Last edited by Ozzycamperboy on Fri May 18, 2007 11:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My wife is on a number of Sci Fi forums (yes I married a nerd) and they require you to access the forum using a Yahoo account, because they are utilising their security (manual sign in) to prevent the automatic processing from spammers.

Not sure about the others like hotmail.

Never argue with a fool! They drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience!

There are lots of traps with the password issue, many mail servers block/filter our emails etc. the software has limitations and many of them are security based. But anyway if you are having trouble accessing your account let me know I can change your password and forward it on to the email on file if its wrong I will let you know you can also always email me via the camping.com.au website with any problems.

I don't even remember reading those other posts himm, I think the main problem was I have not had the time and resources to maintain the forum the way it could be but I think we have the SPAM issue anyway pretty much beat now, at least I have not noticed any SPAM in quite a while. But I have to thank Ozzy for a big part of that and we certainly appreciate the constructive comments from Cruzin and any other contributors. All I can say is we keep chipping away at it.

Komodo wrote:Admittedly BB is one of the worst pieces of forum software available these days though...

what's wrong with it? what's a better one?

i have a smf forumits excellentfree of chargefree of spamheaps of mods eg : arcade , gallery , chat (which i think would be good on here sometimes with the time limit posting)heaps of support tooi think it is the best free software availible

I know Iâ€™m due to upgrade this forum but we are small and I am lazy. One reason we use to get so much SPAM is because we are linked to the camping site so the volume of visitors is heavy, i.e. go to Google and type in Camping we are on or very near the top so we become a target.

We seem to have solved it for now and apart from the SPAM issue we donâ€™t really need any more features that I can see unless anyone has some suggestion of course. double_d of someone mentioned a chat, this can be done, but do you guys really think you will use one? I would like to get a newsletter going, do we have any volunteers for that one?

Had a look at your Auspool forum there double_d (lots of features)and looked at yours a while ago Derik they are both very good and well maintained obvioulsy you put some time into them. I think when the camping forum gets a little more active we will explore both for an upgrade, thanks for the tips.

Basically Ozzy and myself manage this forum it has been going for about 5 years has a quite a few members but most are very quiet, I think we probably have 500 active out of 8,000 members himm not sure why. But any suggestions on how to build and get members to use it more are always welcome.

Hotmail is very easy to hack. I have had 4 different email accounts and now on my 5th. The buggers hack your account and then send spam and bugs to every person in your messenger and address book. Then your pc is stuffed. I now change my password every week... its a pain in the butt... but since doing so I dont seem to have any problems.CheersChick